TogetherTec: Saturday Roundtable

The role or job title/position of somebody helping with personal scheduling and administrative tasks is called “virtual assistant” and is often outsourced to freelancers or offers from lower-income countries like the Philippines as they are on a decent level of English (also, Tim Ferriss’ concepts around the “4-Hour Workweek” come to mind).

Jubilee Briscoe is preparing a course event series supposed to discover wants/needs between the participants, to then later potentially onboard them to a community, those who are interested. The purpose is to get people from GameA to GameB and also promote the movement.

One new project will be to build a generic system for rating attributes of generic entities, which could also power surveying and matching. Many people are interested in rating systems – would make sense to create a list of these individuals to then ask them if they would contribute money to pay the developers who are around working on similar tools already, to have them make a general solution for this problem. If no funding can be found, it’ll still be built, but much, much slower. A crowdfunding campaign might be another option to source money from the interested people in GameB with pretty low risk because the generic rating system is a tangible project/endeavor. Nick Redmark is consistently volunteering his micro-solution-building on some weekends, but other than this activity, the rating system would be a larger project with some developers full-time dedicated to it. Anyhow, the number of themes and projects currently is just exploding.

Jubilee wants to learn video editing, but it’s less about using a software tool, and instead more about finding relevant portions in the pile of video recordings.

TogetherTec: Board Meeting

The task was to fill in the vision/mission document based on the Protocol.Love template for TogetherTec. The latter is designed to be a support/umbrella organization to help with tools, infrastructure, income/funding, coordination, individual assistance, etc. for omni-win/GameB projects.

Trust is always needed, values are the first priority. It’s not entirely clear how to measure success in that regard. On the other hand, values are mostly conflicting between people (their selection and priorization). Tradeoffs and compromises are inevitable. Still, values should always be indicated very transparently. There’s no point in getting stuck/blocked by a quest for perfection. Instead, progress is preferred over perfection. Currently, one main activity of TogetherTec is to gain some initial capital from GameA to get a co-op venture capital fund set up and started for GameB, to then act as an incubator/accelerator.

Part of the vision is that there should be no need to have to worry about scarcity of food, water, shelter, also ending the stresses of being busy with having to gather/earn such. Instead, the goal is to reach satisfaction, to replace fear with love, enabling everybody to volunteer out of generosity. It might not be much useful to actually define the mission, as the individual projects will each address their own mission and goals, so TogetherTec would be fine with acting in a general enabling/supporting capacity. TogetherTec wants to help these projects succeed, as they otherwise elsewhere would have a hard time in a GameA world/environment.

GameB is a somewhat nebulous term with various interpretations/definitions offered by members of the community, but for the purposes of filling this document or in general, there’s no need to explicitly decide on the details, as it could discourage people if being dogmatic about it. The concept can be left vague on purpose because otherwise people might immediately engage in some theoretical/abstract debate which is not useful/constructive for practical work. TogetherTec just offers another interpretation or take on it.

Focus should be on helping humans first as this leads to helping other beings as well, because otherwise there’s no room and relaxation to even enter wider considerations about the environment.

The Protocol.Love process of spending eight consecutive hours together for really figuring out a concise, condensed, clear kernel of a project hasn’t been started/entered yet, so this is an open preparation in advance. Afterwards too TogetherTec will always remain open as well as radically transparent, which is in fact the main point of Protocol.Love in the first place.

Office Hour Call

Bruce Horn shared slides about the importance of memory for AI. Frode Hegland reports that VisualMeta is well received and pretty useful. Also, work on a glossary capability continues, connected to collapsed search results as well. Raine Revere describes how taking care of techno-social questions can slow progress down in comparison to the faster, financially more successful Silicon Valley companies.

VisualMeta’s connection to AI is the interest in the identity of terms/expressions. In Raine’s em outliner exploration project, the arrangement/positioning of nodes in the hierarchy (a visualization/rendering of the internal graph structure) determines the categorical/semantic meaning. Raine’s idea of “diagrammatic hypertext” is an intermediary between the notions of “spacial hypertext” (probably some kind of the later, confused free-floating map/3D renderings) and early, original textual/augmented hypertext.

Frode remembers that Dame Wendy Hall suggested writing prose is too inconvenient, but instead she would prefer dragging in a bunch of textual snippets, which then would still be interrelated in such a workspace. Christopher Gutteridge’s Webleau (also in form of Liquid Space) comes to mind. The question is if the final result to be shared with other people is a document or a graph by nature.

The intuition would be that with “diagrammatic text”, most of the meaning is derived informally and isn’t explicitly encoded, so additional prose might be needed as it otherwise likely remains primarily a tool for creating structures of/for personal knowledge. That’s fine as there will always be a need to tell stories/narratives. Raine and Frode both believe that formal ontologies are dead and a bad idea. The main objective is to support fluid model handling/development.

Duke Crawford entered an accelerator for creative startups and looks at a model for speeding up a generic/universal crowdfunding model.

Frode reveals the inspiration for starting to host these Office Hours: he tried to do some master classes (the course series), and the other reason was people entering and leaving during a call with Dave King as if it were a physical office.

Open Global Mind: Check-In Call

Anecdotes about the origins of certain foods/drinks were shared. Online meeting fatigue and “fear of missing out” are observed. Max Harper works on soon releasing a tag connector plugin into the Miro marketplace. Ken Homer proposed an extra call in the month to onboard new people by way of a video meeting. Julian Gomez describes that the SIGGRAPH event was held on Zoom because of COVID-19, but many experiences planned to be demonstrated there aren’t for a flat 2D display device (not supporting smell, etc.), so adapting was a challenge for the participants. VR/AR/XR didn’t get widely adopted yet for online meetings.

Regarding the topic of education, OGM is bridging over and connecting with Peeragogy. Pete Kaminski looks into preserving large video files and wonders how to make decentralized profiles work. It is pointed out that identifying a single metric/indicator for tracking improvement to then super-focus on it is a great instrument for making a lot of progress and also getting forward with all the secondary issues.

CICoLab is a sister organization of OGM. It is realized that there are huge difficulties with replicating/sharing the knowledge of each group amongst, between, across group boundaries. One faces many weird techno-platform questions which need to be answered, and without proper design/architecture/principles, one decision might conflict with or prevent other options that would be needed to make it all work. With the COVID-19 lockdown, people got out and resorted to Google Docs and Spreadsheet. What would be the meta-layer and machinery of a better system to support online collaboration and knowledge curation? Who’s working on that? How do Roam, Obsidian, Notion cross over to the other world of TheBrain, Kumu and similar graph visualizations? What about outliners?

There’s a concern about the check-in practice, that these take too long, and for focus should be more concise. But then no other outlet has been found yet to update others about what everybody is doing. No solution yet for where to put the profile pages. Check-ins also serve a social purpose, and for discovery/connecting between participants. It is planned to start more calls in the week for the individual working groups, likely organized around the popular, main themes.

There might not yet be agreement on what OGM is about/for, which makes it hard for people to figure out if/how to contribute. OGM might be the central communication hub, branching into many separate, maybe more technical or domain-specific sub-groups for particular exertise, while exchanging/reporting back and forth between these. One idea for a first practical step everybody can take together was to form a purchasing cooperative to rent licenses of proprietary software tools. Separate, personal one-on-one conversations can be very expensive/draining for experts who tend to be already entirely occupied/busy. There need to be better signalling/coordination practices/tools/methodologies. A dashboard of dashboards is proposed, and Usenet mentioned as a positive example.

TogetherTec: Saturday Roundtable

How to measure the satisfaction and omni-win success of a GameB project? Update on the generic rating system and database model approach to support such.

Solution Raising concept of 10.000 people each donating 10$ inspired by Barbara Sher’s TED talk and now using an outreach strategy similar to multi-level marketing is designed to have people post their wants/needs, so others can more easily help realizing these. Could be a tool, site, app, or a low-tech practice or methodology.

Discussion about profit/salary/accumulation cap and potential issues with universal basic income.

TogetherTec: Board Meeting

Raymond D. Powell of Protocol.Love is building a browser to look up organizations which use the protocol, so one can learn about them and what they’re doing. The concept is based on vulnerable, radical transparency, with which the notion of GameB is naturally very much aligned.

TogetherTec might serve as an umbrella organization, just currently with a project to build a Salesforce plugin product to generate initial income.

Daniel Jordan is interested in building a service for lending stuff like tools, books, etc. similar to Craigslist. Existing sites are each missing one or other aspect, and might be too open. Fine-grained access/sharing control is missing, to configure specifically who can or can’t see an offer. Value of researching existing projects/initiatives and insights by those who did such before (why they failed, what does work) is recognized. GameB might have significant economical advantages where it’s growing and stewarding a commons versus GameA Silicon Valley unicorn pursuits (which is often scrapping perfectly good concepts/ideas because they didn’t meet certain profit-oriented metrics).

Office Hour Call

This is the first “Office Hour”, open invitation to this weekly call. David G. Lebow describes working with HyLighter, a sensemaking tool for sourcing from many documents to then condense, summarize, synthesize them to gain some insights. It’s a frame building tool following or constructing a/the frame building model (based on data frame theory), which aids with assembling a narrative from annotations on the side margin, so related comments/snippets (also across documents) can be integrated into the storytelling effort. Understanding arrives after spending time in the content and thinking about it, when the latter meets a prepared mind.

It was pointed out that the cultural expectations/conventions in regard of the authority of the author, ownership demands, hesitation to work on or contribute to the material of other people, are major obstacles preventing many from doing experiments, explorations and crucial work, partially because of being more concerned about reputation. As an example, we ought to also look into things like a Trump-related book, any sort of not just different, but conflicting/opposed opinions.

General difficulty of getting foward with any of the technical work was described, which is mostly due to different perspectives, goals, approaches. For instance, getting something as simple as VisualMeta adopted takes a lot of energy. Other capabilities like concordance or glossary are available in certain products.

The participants share a passion for poetry.

Open Global Mind: Soil & Agriculture Call

The large-scale trend of increasing exploitation, consumption, waste of non-regeneratable resources correlating with the rapid decrease of carrying capacity, supply and downtime for regeneration was outlined. This has huge implications on health and led to the energy crisis as well. There’s the systemic interrelation of man-made carbon-dioxide emissions, climate change and depletion of soil and the entire biological ecosystem.

The “4 per 1000 Initiative” proposes to trap more of the carbon-dioxide in the soil so less of it ends up in the atmosphere. The plan is to appeal/lobby to policy makers, to invest in farms so they implement more favorable agriculture.

Big players in the market have their supply chain commodified/standardized, with requirements that demand industrial growing processes (likely contract-wise, processing-wise, and compliance/expectations around hygene) with farmers being integrated vertically and dependent. They can’t partially or dynamically change to natural food production. In the context of COVID-19, the immune system is basically the only defense, and that’s usually in a bad condition because of industrial food/eating as it is encouraged and promoted by the industry to benefit their business model. Low-income families sometimes get support money from the government, and that’s sucked out again by the cheap dumping price products sold by the big food chains. These investments don’t stay in or improve the local community at all, nor do these increase their self-sustainability. “Food deserts” leave large numbers of citizens without access to fresh food.

Gene Bellinger already has a systems diagram of the food system.

There might not be much hope that policy makers will be of help to start effective steps towards such change, but maybe some crisis could lead to pragmatic solutions and subsequently inform policies. Highly decentralized, independent entities/spots/communities are needed, but these also need to follow some structure in order to allow for interconnected, dynamic adaptability, like Kibbutz or women support circles in India.

Regional food hubs have their own agenda, but small business support centers should be attached to them engaging in micro-financing and the development of small + local businesses. Non-profit approach didn’t go anywhere despite the United States Department of Agriculture invested money into it – ended up in some 501(c)(3)s sustaining only themselves. The food industry doesn’t want community improvement/self-reliance to succeed, has it easy to throw sand in the works. Instead, the “soft franchise” idea is about some kind of national think-tank with the goal to aid the installation of regional food hubs, which then form partnerships to supply local retailers, acting as a catalyst and support structure to improve local communities.

It was recognized that many great ideas/concepts are trapped in slides, documents, PDFs and therefore not widely known, discovered, shared, discussed, discoverable, discussable.

Development best achieved without comprehensive studies in advance and then imposing “solutions” onto people who don’t want them. Instead, gather resources to be readily available at hand, then ask what’s wanted/needed allowing people to choose (cherry-pick), adapt the kit to local circumstances, get buy-in from people who then feel they’ve built it, that it’s theirs, that they’re in control.

Looking for synergies for solving/solved problems and best practices, because many are working on the same issues. Patenting, siloing, etc. are very harmful and bad. Instead, gather the constructive people and activities. There’s great distrust towards all NGOs and those who do good because the majority of the system is flawed, so it’s all flat-out dismissed entirely, so even less support is provided for genuinely good, altruistic, important activities.

Would be lovely to set up OGM as a public benefit corporation. Some people are eager to get practical and jump into doing projects, but the organisational framing is important too. Currently there’s lots of cheap money out there waiting to be invested if there only would be an adequate entity established to properly take it.

Open Global Mind: Check-In Call

It was observed that the notion of topical subject-matter focus/interest groups (on domains/topics like food, climate change, education for example) is emerging. Several people work on audio/video curation based on transcripts or summarization. Financial analysts, risk assessors, insurers apparently recently started to publish more material about climate change as simply another factor which needs to be managed and taken into account as part of providing their services/consulting. Connections to Michel Bauwens and the peer production/economy start forming. Separately, there’s the concern of the global food production facing significant losses, leading to the risk of food supply shortages.

Tool building could be organized as a service function/capacity. Our frameworks/paradigms, jargon, perspectives might be different in terms of how we approach, view, interpret the world, but each and every such entry point should lead towards interdisciplinarity and arriving at some systemic, wholistic understanding. Meta-synergies with other groups/communities should be identified in order to bootstrap mutual support. How to attract mass, gain momentum? But then, it needs a little bit more organization, for general awareness and deliberate focus, commitment, investment, coordination in order to channel and apply the energy efficiently and effectively, to not simply waste/burn it. Change-making needs to be encouraged, supported, motivated as well as motivating.

“Peeragogy Monthly Wrap” Working Group Call

Monthly wrap

Send out request for contributions to PAR for wrap

Also ask for a personal update from people of 140 characters or less plus one link

Feature for the wrap about a literary background for the PAR/wrap → book Joe Corneli is reading where drivers check-in about how they’re doing

Peeragogical Action Reviews

Pattern of Patterns → Which one would you like to fill in?

Forms for entering pattern and PAR: https://groupware-systems.org/pattern-forms/

Where are things going that have been filled-in?

Maybe have a visual showing for dashboard of recent updates so you have an automated form? One web page pulling in iframes?

More links

https://github.com/OpenGlobalMind/ogm-project-list

https://groupware-systems.org/skreutzer/ogm/projects.xhtml

Other

We also talked about a software tool for recording check-in update videos.